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Tyrazyne
Tyrazyne Born with a passion for adventure and exploration, the scaly Tyrazyne are warm-blooded, gregarious, highly intelligent Lizard-men They live in the swampy jungles to the south-east of the main human lands, and expertly sail their sea crafts far past where men dare to voyage. They are quick to laugh, gamble, fight, and flee, at various times, seeming somewhat impulsive to the other races. Their speech is a rapid-fire mix of squawks rumbles, grunts, hoots and clicks, and when they do learn the language of men or dwarves, they often can't help but prattle on as fast as auctioneers, adding in all manner of extra sounds for emphasis. Strangely they seem to form stronger bonds with other races than they do with their own kind, and they do not know any concept of permanent romantic attachment at all, preferring instead to simply mate during their designated season, and then depart. Tyrazyne possess an above average inclination towards mathematics and astrology, and their navigational star-charts are prized around the world, but they can also be generally categorized as flighty and impulsive. As a variant of Lizard-men Tyrazyne possess scaly skin of several colors. All shades of green can be found, as well as black, orange, and pale white, with some possessing bands or stripes of these multiple colors. More commonly found is a mottled mix of dark and light green, and most Tyrazyne posses thick crests of strong skin and bone on their heads, usually forming ridges or horns at the back of their skulls. Most are roughly the same height, as humans, but a fair bit heavier, due to denser muscles and the addition of a thick, powerful tail that stretches behind them, like a crocodile. While being technically warm-blooded, a Tyrazyne's health tends to drop of sharply once they leave the humid tropics of their homeland on the Gray Coast, which is the Mainlund's southern-most quadrant. They require high humidity to keep their skin from crackling, and become very lethargic when the temperature drops below tropical-levels. They require heavy amounts of sunlight or else they suffer from a vitamin deficiency after a few days, and most are mortally terrified of snow or ice, these things being completely foreign in their lands. However, given their love of traveling, its not uncommon to find them sailing alongside humans up the coastlines all over the Mainlund, but usually they intend to return home after no more than a few months away. Their mental capacity especially seems to dull if not returned to the tropics periodically. Tyrazyne are born with an innate love of the water, and of boats. Possessing a strong tail means that their young ones can swim quite well, often before they can manage upright walking, and imbues one with a sense of safety when it comes to sailing rickety rafts across tidal rivers and bays. Shipwrecked Tyrazyne have been known to swim ashore from several miles out to sea when their crafts sink unexpectedly, an immensely valuable trait for a race of sailors. However, despite being excellent swimmers, their kind was not particularly known for advanced ship-building. They lacked the engineering skills to develop ships that could travel further than a few hundred miles at a time, and their ships consisted mostly of skiffs and longboats before they began co-mingling with other races that possessed sailing ships. Tyrazyne possess incredible visual acuity and spacial reasoning. They have near-perfect photographic memories, and can decipher visual puzzles far faster than other races. This memorization ability extents to star charts, which is why they are such capable astronomers. A Tyrazyne with a clear view of the night sky can essentially tell what their position is at an time, including following complex routes and direction changes along the way. Their love of complex geometric art and shapes has led to the development of an incredibly advanced pictograph-based language, and their chief form of art are complex tapestries that blur the lines between alphabetic symbols and art. Their written language does not flow left-to-right, but rather can change directions, and thus its meaning, in the course of a document. Their tapestries are gigantic paragraphs of written data, but flowing in such a way that the individual letters form complex artistic shapes as well, adding information and context to the pure sentences. However, their reptilian brains are less capable at retaining emotional contexts and logic, and outside of their incredible visual memories, they can be considered quite absent minded by other folk. A Tyrazyne adventurer might have an entire castle floor-plan memorized in his head as he sneaks past the guards, but could very easily forget the name of the princess he's supposed to rescue, or exactly what time the guards are supposed to go on break. Seeking Adventure Most Tyrazyne do not seem to value standard material wealth, and spend a somewhat large portion of their lives in leisure activities, such as intellectual pursuits (like the mathematics they are known for) or adventuring activities. There are an endless amount of islands to navigate, chart out, and claim as a sailor/explorer, and Tyrazyne are known for their love of non-lethal duels with each other over these claims. Juvenile and Young male Tyrazyne are extraordinarily aggressive with one another, with fighting happening at an instinctual level, and a lot of effort was spent by the society to ensure that these aggressions are carried out away from any young or old individuals who could get hurt, or any property that could be damaged, as well as being (ideally) non-lethal in nature. Tyrazyne might form small parties of like minded individuals, but as they were never really a "pack" or "tribal" species, they almost never fight with each other collectively. That is to say, two individuals might fight, but clashes involving gangs or groups of Tyrazyne together almost never happen. While Tyrazyne might have close acquaintances that they travel with, whom can be relied upon, they do not form deep emotional bonds with fellow Tyrazyne. Strangely Tyrazyne are far more likely to form a bond with a non-Tyrazyne. This goes back to their deep-seated, ancestral, reptilian nature, where their people were grouped together like a mob of crocodiles but did not form "pack" or "tribal" bonds, and if your brother next to you get sick and starts looking weak, well, that's just a chance for you to kill him when no one is looking and eat him. The Tyrazyne today, even though they have moved far beyond this mentality intellectually, still have this urge in their genetics, and so their societies are arranged to so individuals have some amount of personal space which isn't to be violated lightly. Even children, once they reach a certain age, will have their own tiny huts erected to sleep in, so that they do not have to sleep in the direct company of other Tyrazynes. Uncommon Communities Family life is very, very different for these lizard men than for most other races. They do not truly even posses "families" to begin with. They have a distinct mating season (the start of the rainy season each year) and during this time male and female Tyrazyne pair off to mate quickly, then (usually) split up. Very high ranking males might try to keep a stable of females under their supervision, but this is viewed as a very hard endeavor as the females feel no sense of loyalty to any one particular male. The Tyrazyne women will then, 2-3 months after the mating season, lay a clutch of eggs, and will usually band together in small, secretive communities to do so, repelling any males who come near. In the semi-permanent cities (flotillas, really) this function has been moved to a certain social class of females whom guard the eggs for all the women in the society. This is sort of the reptilian equivalent to a wet-nurse, and these females are not held in particularly high esteem, but its a job that someone must do. Once the eggs hatch, the young Tyrazyne are more advanced than most other species. They cannot yet talk, but can crawl a little and can swim. The youth are herded together into a school, and protected by designated members of the society, usually the largest, most physically dominant females. In some ancient time, the males of the species were known to eat younger individuals, so there's a deep-seated mistrust of males in regards to very young Tyrazyne. Certainly, among infamous evil Tyrazyne (foul necromancers and such) there is a pattern of cannibalization that these individuals seemingly can't help but fall back into. The youthful Tyrazyne are kept together, guarded by the females, for several years. For the first few years, a mother Tyrazyne might be able to recognize a youth as her own, if she sat and guarded her own egg-clutch, but if recognition doesn't happen quickly, and isn't re-enforced by contact and communication over the years, then parent-child relationships are never identified and formed. Even when a particular parent-child pair are aware of each other, the relationship is something more akin to how a human might feel about their second cousin, twice removed. The genetic connection is recognized, but not particularly cherished. The large females whom guard the young ones, while often being overbearing to the point of cruelness, actually form longer-lasting bonds with their young wards than other bonds in the society. A young Tyrazyne will feel the most loyalty towards their brood-mother, as opposed to any other relationship. It is this relation that persists the longest. The brood-mothers themselves have a deep-seated connection to their wards, often making them feel very vulnerable threatened, or angry. This is not a species whom evolved with cooperative living, the adaptation of the brood-mother concept is fairly new, and a lot of them struggle with the emotions of it. Brood-mothers paradoxically are known to completely snap and murder all their wards, or perhaps become convinced that males are plotting to come murder the youth, and preemptively murder males in their sleep to stop this (usually) imaginary, irrational threat. Most Tyrazyne are carnavores, enjoying mostly fish and fowl in their diet (mammals are small and rare in their tropical home, and they are thus put off by the idea of eating anything with fur or hair). They will, in lean time, eat some of the larger insects that live in the jungle, but this is definitely a sign of poverty among their people. There is some genetic variance among these people, in that occassional pockets of Tyrazyne look and behave differently from the norm. They can include groups with much thicker bodies whom have switched to a vegetarian diet, as well as phenotypes than are whip-chord thin with elongated snake-like torsos. These pockets are rare, but do occur, usually in deeply isolated villages far in-land from the coast.